Theodore Lukits

Theodore Nikolai Lukits (1897 - 1992) was a well known California portrait painter who pained many famous actors and actresses of the Silent Film era. He was also a gifted plein-air painter, muralist and a prominent teacher who taught for more than sixty years.

Early history

Lukits was born in Timişoara, Transylvania, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He imigrated to the United States with his family in 1900 when he was three and he grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. Lukits was a child prodigy and he began formal studies at Washington University School of Fine Arts before he was twelve. Lukits moved to Chicago when he was fifteen to attend the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. He won every major award at the Art Institute including the Bryan Lathrop Traveling Scholarship. During his tenure at the Art Institute he did illustrations for major publications such as Cosmopolitan and the Saturday Evening Post. Lukits moved to Los Angeles in 1921, after post-graduate studies at the Art Institute and a period of study under the Czech master of Art Nouveau painter and Illustrator Alphons Mucha who was exhibiting his Slav Epic murals in the United States.

Professional career

After he arrived in California he rapidly became known for his portraits of early Hollywood figures Theda Bara, Pola Negri, Mae Murray and Ala Nazimova. The portrait Lukits painted of the Mexican screen legend Dolores Del Rio was exhibited at the premier of one of her films and reproduced in newspapers in Los Angeles and Mexico City. Lukits began the Lukits Academy in the early 1920's and he continued teaching until his retirement at age ninety. He was a well known plein-air painter, choosing the pastel medium for more than one-thousand sketches he did on location in the Sierra Nevada, Death Valley, the Mojave Desert, along the California coast and at the Grand Canyon. In the early 1930's Lukits also did a series of paintings of vaqueros and female dancers that are know known as the Fiesta Suite, as studies for a mural project for Howard Hughes that was never completed, This series of pastel and oil studies depicted many of the horsemen and young Latino actresses who came to Los Angeles to work as riders, stuntmen and extras in Hollywood films. Theodore Lukits has been the subject of retrospective exhibitions at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California, the Carnegie Museum in Oxnard, California, the Muckenthaller Cultural Center in Fullerton, California and Mission San Juan Capistrano.

References

* Morseburg, Jeffrey, Theodore Lukits, An American Orientalist, Pacific Asia Museum, 1998
* Hughes, Eden, Artists in California 1786-1940, Hughes Publishing, 2001